Farewell to genre: Plot, meaning, and eudaemonic paths in social narratives

Abstract

Narratives, it has been argued, serve to represent, explain, transform, and even constitute the social world. However, efforts to apply narrative theory to the social world have become mired in conceptual ambiguity. The culprit of much of this confusion is the notion of genre, which, as a formal property of social narratives, has become hopelessly confused. Instead, when the study of the social world turns to the formal elements of plot structure, I argue that the analysis of how a protagonist’s state of well-being is emplotted is a far more helpful analytic frame. To this end, I delineate a typology of narratives based on what I call their eudaemonic path (the Greek term eudaemonia capturing the concept of ‘well-being’ more fully than the term happiness) and conclude that eudaemonic paths provide explanatory insight regarding the content that is selected for and omitted from particular social narratives. And it is on this more certain foundation – rather than the slippery footing of so-called genre – that the formal elements of narrative can be said to influence social action and cultural change.